“Pretension and gatekeeping are the chains that hold creativity back.”
-unattributed quote I just made up
Heart of Darkness was written by Polish writer Joseph Conrad about his experience in the British ivory trade in the continent of Africa. Unlike almost every adaptation of the work, the nation’s military isn’t actually involved in any substantial ways, the book goes out of its way to mention that Conrad’s character Marlow is in the private sector but working with the tacit approval of the brutal 1800s British government. One of the strangest things about reading it in 2025 is just how seamless the transition from British private industry in the 1800s to American military interventionism in the 1900s, and into the 2000s, is. The man being sought in the novel is still named Kurtz, he’s still a strange, aloof genius that suddenly stopped doing his job the way his bosses wanted it done, and the protagonist is sent in to get the ivory, and see if Kurtz can be reasoned with, or if a harsher hand is needed. Though explicitly, the protagonist is not an assassin. In his own words, he is a sailor first-and-foremost and his great desire is to explore the unknown. The book uses dated language, of course, but it’s far, far more critical of British “adventures” in the African continent than many of its contemporaries. There’s a tone of irony and wit, of a real, grounded look at humanity absent from a lot of other English literature of the time. It is brutally human in how it portrays the utter madness of the trade. And it’s very, very odd looking back on both of them that neither Apocalypse Now nor Spec Ops: The Line got much credit for how faithful of an adaptation they were. Less surprising is that Spec Ops: The Line was viewed as “lesser-than” upon release, mostly owing to pretentious gatekeeping around “The Cinema.”
It’s a strange thing, having grown up in the reality of what internet discourse used to be. People pine for a simpler, pre-social media time and while I think social media will probably go down as one of the most culturally destructive inventions humanity ever came up with, this buries the past that the internet early on was essentially a gathering place for casual bigotry sprinkled over pretentious pop-culture cock measuring contests. Worse yet, the people keeping the gates weren’t any more experts than any of us, they just spoke with more authority, usually by virtue of being a bit older, and knowing more trivia. And, of course, they often had a strong hand on banning anyone who disagreed with them on the forums they controlled, those bastions of free-speech that they were. The blunt truth is: they’d simply had more time to be exposed to what was considered classic art at the time, and there was no art more classic in the ’80s and ’90s than the cinema of the ’70s. The brilliant art made under a cloud of cocaine dust and heavy metals in the air and drinking water we’re only just starting to reckon with.
Because I’m genuinely curious: how many of you all have actually sat down and read Heart of Darkness? How many of you know it as anything more than “the book that Apocalypse Now is kinda-sorta based on?” Because one of the single most surreal things about reading it in 2025 is: just how similar it is to the movie in-terms of broad themes and characters. And yet, in the ’70s, Apocalypse Now was receiving mixed reviews from critics at the time and was barely seen as an adaptation of a literary classic. Because let no one tell you that people had “better taste” back when the entertainment now viewed as classic first came out. Few reviews mention it in more than passing, and at least one believed the book’s protagonist Marlow was “more sane at the start” than Sheen’s Willard, a reading I am utterly baffled by as Marlow was anything but. And while many praised its depictions of hypocritical violence and moral ambiguity, and many others loved the spectacle it presented, a great many reviewers wrote it off as an overblown vanity project, as the apotheosis of ’70s “auteur” excess taken to its logical, and nearly lethal, extreme. Add onto that the story of the thing’s creation almost overshadowing it, and people were not as united on the movie in its own time as snobs might want us all to remember. One critic even specifically went out of her way to say that while it aspires to be high-art, it’s not “challenging enough” to the audience achieve the arbitrary title. And I wonder what movie they were watching, as I found a recent viewing to be disturbingly blunt in showing the realities of war and a brilliant soldier’s inability to grasp why it’s happening. It’s blunt, at least, as long as you weren’t expecting to be spoon-fed the themes by it. Coppola himself said the movie is less anti-war, and more anti-lies, something that it and The Line share in-common more so than Heart of Darkness, which is far more bluntly anti-colonialism.
In the same way I wonder what writers, some of whom I have tremendous respect for and some of whom I question the credentials of, were thinking when Spec Ops: The Line released to similar critical reception in 2012. One reviewer called the dialog “comical and ridiculous,” complaining that the hardened soldiers swore too much, or were too vulgar while he seemed to completely miss the point of the vulgarity and violence. Others hung it out to dry for its also-ran 3rd person shooter gameplay, a criticism I take slightly more credence in as the game was aping its contemporaries in order to subvert them, but that’s where The Line proves it had a fool’s trick waiting up its sleeve: the utter subversion of said power fantasy. And while the narrative is usually the thing that received a great deal of fawning praise, and rightly so, it’s not what actually subverts the most from the shooters at the time: it’s the power fantasy itself. Spec Ops: The Line is a horror game wearing the trappings of a mindless action game. It’s the fantasy of going in, shooting enough brown people to win, and being hailed a hero. Call of Duty dabbled in a few scenes of horrific, unexpected violence, but it never broke from the bombast, or had its protagonists and their allies participate in said atrocities. Never the way The Line does. Because the line that is truly crossed during the game isn’t one the characters cross, it’s one the game crosses: player agency. And people HATED the game for it.
It’s easy enough to go back and check out user reviews and forum posts asking, and often demanding, to know what the route to the “good ending” was, or why it was impossible to “do the right thing,” that the protagonist being unavoidably wrong ruined the game because it took agency from the player, in a way that only a video game could. That’s the entire crux of the game’s narrative: you can’t do the right thing, because you’re not the good guys. You’re not the hero. You are only making things worse at every step, because that is what any imperialist nation, half-cocked, uninformed, and overly-confident, always does every single time. Why should this be any different? Because it’s a game? Because it’s America? Because we’re the “good guys” in video games? Because you control the action? By giving the player power but removing control, the game traps you in a metaphorical Hell, and that plays into a strange, subtle twist that was mentioned in zero contemporary reviews. I only heard about it when one of the game’s writers gave an interview where he himself admitted surprise that no one was talking about the fact that Walker, the player character, dies at the start of the game, during a helicopter crash as he and his squad try to leave Dubai, and that the entire game is set in Hell. And in removing the ability for the player to “win” correctly, it takes them right there with Walker: across so many different cultures with so many interpretations of what Hell is, almost a universal theme is: the total loss of hope and ability to change. Failure after failure at redemption and choosing to do better, to be better.
Charging into storm-ravaged Dubai, Captain Walker, here standing with Marlow or Willard in his want to do the right thing, seems to have the bona fides of a genuine American hero. It takes surprisingly little to start to show the cracks in that facade, his motivations constantly shift to whatever will allow them to stay rather than withdraw. To keep pushing forward toward Col. Konrad (a knowing reference to the author, as well as the overall character of Kurtz) in his literal tower, with Walker constantly assuring his squadmates that everything will make sense once he’s reached. It doesn’t take long for him to start to appeal to his squadmates’ humanity, telling them that they’re here to rescue people, despite that not being their initial mission of reconnaissance and report. Fighting through a civilian militia, and a rogue division of American troops who turned Dubai into their own kingdom, it becomes clearer and clearer that things aren’t nearly as simple as Walker needs them to be.
After massacring unarmed civilians, and the soldiers protecting them, with white phosphorus, he insists it’s now a revenge mission against the monstrous people who “made them do that.” Even though Walker himself, played by YOU, was the one who kept them pushing forward, who kept them going, who rained literal fire onto the refugees and soldiers protecting them. It doesn’t matter what happens, Walker will always have a reason to keep moving forward and never learn. He will always have goal posts to push further and further back. He will “never surrender” in the most toxic way possible, and he is responsible for the horrors that happen, while accepting none of the blame and learning. At the time of its release, this was treated as mostly a gimmick. A way to portray the loss of sanity by having Walker and Delta Squad become more savage in their dialog, more vicious and less professional as they become more and more desperate. It felt like there was almost a fear in a lot of the reviews, that they were giving a ‘mere video game’ too much credit for reaching the highs of something like Apocalypse Now, and making the audience experience it, rather than view it. A piece of real art that was made in the crucible of real human suffering! Unlike video games, still struggling to be viewed on the same level as movies, and likely never to achieve the prestige of a sainted book from the 1800s. But it’s neither of those things, it was the next logical step in fiction, and storytelling.
It’s a video game that uses the interactivity of the medium to do something that a movie and a book couldn’t, regardless of quality or influence. Both of those are passive entertainment, you turn the page, you continue watching, the narrative unfolds. Video games must be interacted with, and by allowing you to do it, by giving you choices that do impact and affect the narrative, but never allow you redemption, the video game allows you to put yourself in the shoes of people who want to help, but as one of the game’s chilling, haunting tooltips tells you after you’ve committed at least two atrocities: “You cannot understand. Nor do you wish to.” The tooltips got surprisingly little talking about in contemporary reviews as well, but the way they transition from “helpful” to “mocking, cruel, and downright horrific” is fairly gradual, and plays into the notion of the game taking place in Hell. The Devil is in-control of the narrative, the Devil is trying to impart upon you the message of the game through the tooltips, but this isn’t like Inscryption or Doom where your tormentor has a face you can punch: the game itself is trying to teach you a lesson, and torment you for not learning it, through the actual playing of it. Eventually you no longer receive help, only messages like, “If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here” and “This is your fault.” But it’s Konrad himself who has, perhaps, the most cutting line: “You’re a failure, Walker. Finally we have something in-common.” While what actually happened between Walker and Konrad before the events of the game is still shrouded in the dusts of time and lore, it’s clear Walker views him as a father-figure, or at least a mentor, and that Konrad, in the end, was pretty lousy at both jobs. There’s even a file to find on him diagnosing him with severe PTSD, but since he was hailed as a hero and a genius at the time, he didn’t seek help and instead sought to blame everyone else around him, propping his own ego up until it got thousands of people killed. Just like Walker does throughout the narrative.
Spec Ops: The Line is brutally honest about the realities of American interventionism, and it’s brutally honest about how little the good guys actually ever do good things. You’ll run into CIA agents who seem to be on your side, until one destroys the city’s water supply, damning everyone to a slow, agonizing death. And why? To erase what happened there, to erase the failures of American interventionism. Willard is sent to kill Kurtz in Apocalypse Now because his superiors no longer trust him, and because they believe he’s gone mad as he no longer wishes a sudden, violent end to his ‘enemies.’ But Kurtz has plenty to say about the madness and pointlessness of war, pointing out the hypocrisy of teaching soldiers to drop fire onto human beings, but not allowing them to write “FUCK” on the side of their plane because ‘it’s obscene.’ These are the ideas he’s going to be killed for, not the ones regarding how best to slaughter and massacre. Because as Willard points out: “accusing someone of murder here is like handing out a speeding ticket at the Indy 500.” In that way: he joins his literary sibling and his video game progeny. “War is madness” is an easy thing to say, it’s depth only matched by the apparent shallowness that usually gets noticed. It’s far more difficult to show. But Marlow, both Kurtzes, Willard, Konrad and Walker all do, all in the same way: assumption of virtue. Just following orders. All three assume they’re the good guys for no reason other than the fact that they must be, after all: they’re agents of their governments in some form-or-fashion. Even Marlow, technically part of the private sector, is largely fetching the ivory for the trade companies that report to the Crown.
All three men see the realities of war, but not just war: conquest for profit. Heart of Darkness‘ narrator knows the madness of it, he even refers to the notion of it when he says, “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” Willard experiences, firsthand, the pointlessness of everything going on, reading in Kurtz’s words that soldiers are made too comfortable in modern war, and that is counter-intuitive as it attracts people looking for easy work. Willard himself observes that the USO Shows, stereos blaring American rock and roll, the food, a near-riot caused by some half-naked women dancing, everything is designed to safely remind the soldiers of home, but it only makes them miss it more. While Walker and his men don’t have any such observations, because it’s a video game, it can do so much more with perception and reality. A squadmate thought dead can ambush your characters, and when killed murmur, “The only villain here, Walker, is you. It’s only you,” while Walker pleads with him that his death was an accident and his remaining squadmate demands to know what’s going on. Because he doesn’t see the hallucination, he’s just following orders. Walker can experience deja-vu as he relives the moments before his death, though this time he gets to live longer. And do even more harm.
Spec Ops: The Line doesn’t have a good ending, because Walker isn’t a good person. He might have done things that could be viewed as heroic, but his inability to pause, to take stock, to do anything besides push forward, no matter what, makes him a perfect soldier and an imperfect human being. Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now, talks about how all he’d need are a few divisions of soldiers as dedicated as the Viet-Cong who must “win or die” and he would have the war won. He’s talking about men like Walker, and in that way The Line shows what men like that can accomplish, properly aimed and motivated: nothing good. By taking the agency from the player, by only giving the illusion of a heroic experience that will end with the flag held high and a celebration back home, Spec Ops: The Line can hit in an emotional depth that movies, TV, and books simply can’t: make you feel truly helpless. No matter what you do, it’s the wrong choice. The blood of innocent people is on your hands, because like Walker: you didn’t just put the controller down and walk away. Walker won’t leave, even despite constant repetition that he doesn’t know what’s going on, doesn’t know the situation, just knows: move forward and kill the enemy, and everything will eventually make sense. Which leads him down the road to Hell and beyond redemption. Because at the end of the day: you cannot understand. Nor do you wish to.
